Anxieties like
drones, deer flies, turkey vultures circling my head watching every wrong move
I make. I couldn’t afford the bomb so how could I be a terrorist? Or get it
over with. I’m sick of the wait. I’m standing in front of God’s firing squad in
front of a no smoking sign. Should be out looking for a job that doesn’t exist
like Parsifal and the holy grail. Should be finishing off three paintings for a
quick going out of life sale instead of sitting here writing this. I’m tempted
to go off like an air raid siren at PearlHarbour but I’m trying to keep my
composure by being creative. Creative. My small boy’s sixties heroic notion of
doing some good in the world to make up for being the useless shit my mother
when she was understandably angry with my father thought I was. It was either
that or become a fighter pilot, transfer to an American aircraft carrier, get
recruited by NASA and leave the fucking planet. Poor boys are encouraged like
base metal to turn into gold with a vengeance and golden boys like to drive
their triumphal chariots through a slum. How can the eldest son of a welfare
mother who sacrificed her life like a pelican to raise four children against
all odds ever put anything on the altar that could ever give back full measure
and a bit beside? I’ve tried. And I’ve failed again and again and again. No
grail. No fiscal elixir that’s going to turn the ailing kingdom into money. No
lily white maidens blooming in the swamp of the Fisher King. And I’ve been
thinking though my mother loves me enough to deny it that she really does
deserve a better son than I am. The lost prodigal of the life of the mind and
it doesn’t look as if I’m ever coming back. Black sheep. But the shepherd
stayed with the other ninety-nine. I carried the sins of my father on my back
like a scapegoat driven out into the wilderness and I’m too much of a heretic
(it comes from overthrowing myself every day of my life) to carry anyone’s
banner but I share some dark Renaissance characteristics with Azazel whose eyes
look like two eclipses at both ends of the telescope at once. And it’s rare and
scary but I like to stare into the dark clarity of his intelligence sometimes
the same way I like to be immolated by the stars when I’m feeling especially
black. Creative. That word again. That shibboleth, that mantra, that hidden
name of an unknown god that makes its absence felt like nature’s abhorrence of
a vacuum, that eyebeam projected from the pupil of a black hole in my third eye
I keep leaking out of like an hourglasss in tears. Braille starmaps of the
heart. Cosmologies of feeling on the other side of the shattered mirror that
isn’t whole in the sum of its parts. But can’t find a metaphor or simulacrum to
reflect what’s missing. Look at all these wrecked fire kites I tried to fly
like some kind of image of myself that bore some slight resemblance to the
stars whose indifference didn’t strike me as the death mask of a deep-seated
bias against shining of any kind. That was definitely a west coast sixties
aspiration, chromatic aberration around the gravitational lenses that were
convinced they could bend light and space like a rainbow. See what I mean? Even
if you’ve uprooted yourself like some metaphysical Mandrake man from the
creative seed bed of the sixties, your hypothalamus never forgets.

That’s
why I’m looking for asylum in this poem. That’s why I’ve jumped the embassy
wall like a social democratic exile wanted for starting a revolution among
ingrates. For the first twenty years of writing poetry to touch hearts and
minds like the light touches flowers to what was humanly inviolable and
mystically factual about their own abused divinity hoping it might slowly
become apparent to them like stars emerging from the darkness, no two alike,
seemed radiantly feasible. The message might not be but right now the messenger
feels ridiculous. And for the last three decades almost every painting that
tries to picture me, every poem that blooms in the duff of my decay always
makes me feel I’m writing my last appeal to a hooded executioner about to drop
the other side of a two-bladed lunar ax on the nape of my neck like a new moon
in full eclipse at harvest time. I finish typing. And then I’ve got to wait for
several hours before the muse repatriates my fingertips for crimes against the
inhumanity of human to human, for spreading seditious literature that agitates
the heart like hives of killer bees to turn into secret cells of compassion. No
more bulldozers in the fields where the skylarks lay their eggs. You hear me?
No more children fed like live hamsters to the hydra-headed succubus of Medusan
corporations that turn them hard as rock even before they have a chance to
learn to read their own gravestones. If poets haven’t hung around universities
too long to forget how to curse like a Druid cease and desist or I’ll turn your
trophy chicks into inflatable sex dolls that stick it to your prick like a pin
cushion effigy in a fashionable voodoo ritual. And the karma of every day for
the next ten thousand lifetimes turn into the chronic reckoning the poor know
every one of their godforsaken nights on a planet where all species have been
forced to line up every morning at a foodbank for global resources. If you
refuse to read the writing on the wall I’ll deliver the message to you in comets
that will smear the mirror of your point of view in red slug lines of blood
guilt. Oligarchic obscenities of human lovelessness in the board rooms of Sodom
and Gomorrah. See how easy it is to
talk like God when your own house is on fire? But I’m an old growth
conflagration from the northern cordillera of B.C. and I know how to put fire
out with fire without getting burnt by the inspiration. God’s a lot more
intense and enflamed since he last talked to Moses like a burning bush in the valley
of Tuwa. Either that or people have
grown so insensitive it takes a forest fire to keep anyone’s attention long
enough to deliver a message to pharaoh. Magician in a snake pit. Sitting Bull
revives like a ghost dance that’s been outlawed by one too many treaties. The long
flowing locks of Custer’s honey gold hair flying in the wind have been over run
by killer bees that stick to it like flypaper. It can be dangerous to mistake
the truth for a treaty.

And
I’ve broken all of mine because they weren’t worth the paper they were written
on. I’ve kept my word but the word hasn’t kept me. Creative. Black farce in the
dead ends of tragedy. Creative. How to live orginally and die like a cliche.
Creative. Nothing less than everything all the time. Creative. Living like
hydrogen but giving birth to stars. Creative. Mongoose to cobras that don’t
dance. Creative. Who could have guessed how much dying goes into it? Creative. No
one there to hear it when the tree falls. The sound of one hand clapping for
applause. Creative. Imagination truing the laws of its own origination by
oxymoronically disobeying them. Creative. When the mirrors turn black and you
can see all your afterlives walking on stars like somnambulists all the way to
this one. Creative. Projecting humanly habitable symbols like planets into the
available dimensions of a highly suggestible future. Creative. Anathema,
antidote, antimatter to the destroyers. Creative. Living life as a sum of
destructions that ends in a creative breakthrough. The eclipse as much of an
insight as the light that’s blocked behind. White candle. Black candle. Same
flame. Creative. Your life such a sin of omission the world comes pouring in on
you the way the moon fills its empty cup to the full.

Ask any Greek. Ask Sophocles. Ask
Shakespeare. Tragedy is best expressed in broad daylight. It’s comedy that’s
nocturnal despite appearances. Fools thrive best by night and my whole life
I’ve refused to be an exception. Once you stop letting the darkness use your
head for therapeutic voodoo by sticking hot needles of insight like a snake pit
into your eyes the night might not be a reward but it doesn’t feel like a
vendetta against anyone who took their space and time and life as their
birthright in the first place as if it were a freedom, as water and light and
oxygen are free without discrimination each according to their need. And you’re
just as free to enslave yourself to something, keeping in mind that attachment
too is a Buddha activity, as you are not to. Sometimes liberty doesn’t feel
real to people until they can feel the weight of chains on their back. And
truth to tell what is it that holds most people on a leash like a kite on a
spinal cord if not fear of what’s dangerously unknown about real freedom and
love of their misery as if there were some kind of entertainment value in it?
They see a blue rose and they admire it for its thorns. The ignorant guess
their way into tried and true principles they drive through your heart like a
stake. While the enlightened buddhas all attest to the fact they don’t have any
more of a clue about what’s been arrayed and illuminated before us by our own
shining anymore than lightning and fireflies do. Is it the darkness that
befriends the star or the star that befriends the dark or do you see them like
blue-eyed homicidal equestrians like Custer do as enemies at the opposite ends
of the same broken arrow? I see the beak of an arrowhead and I see the
fletcher’s tail feathers and a long stick of rigid intent but where are the
wings where are the legs? What kind of bird is that can’t hit a note right
without being launched from a one-stringed harp that makes it sing as if it
were born with only one vocal cord? Or a man who shoots his mouth off as if
he’d just fit his tongue to his dick like a trigger? And how can the
picture-music ever take hold of you if it hasn’t got a leg to stand on? A
branch, a powerline, a sacred birch grove, for the red-winged blackbird to
perch on? Whether it’s the Taj Mahal, black and white, or a big dumpy apartment
like the one I’m in trying to dissipate my solitude in the company of the
insane strangers words can be when you don’t let them have their way with you
as if you were just along for the ride. That’s why I’m trying to disappear into
this poem as if it were an endless night sky that doesn’t wash the birds out of
its one good eye like specks of dust looking up at the stars. You can save face
behind a lot of masks and debilitate almost any nightmare that keeps coming
back like a ghost to a seance if there’s no one there to scare in the first
place.

About Me

FORMER POET LAUREATE FOR THE CITY OF OTTAWA, I HAVE PUBLISHED MANY BOOKS AND POEMS OVER THE LAST FORTY-THREE YEARS. WORK TRANSLATED INTO FOUR LANGUAGES. WINNER OF SEVERAL SIGNIFICANT AWARDS, BUT CONSIDER MYSELF ONLY AS GOOD AS MY NEXT POEM OR PAINTING.